Designing a noun guesser for part of speech tagging in Northern Sotho

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Date

Authors

Heid, Ulrich
Prinsloo, Danie J. (Daniel Jacobus), 1953-
Faab, Gertrud
Taljard, Elsabe (Elizabeth)

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

African Language Association of Southern Africa

Abstract

In this article, we describe an element of a suite of computational tools for assigning word-class tags (as a preparation for part of speech (POS) tagging) to word forms in unrestricted Northern Sotho texts. POS-tagging is a step towards a linguistic analysis of the texts, which in turn allows for advanced data extraction. The tool component that is described, identifies (and classifies) noun forms. Several types of linguistic knowledge are used to recognize nouns that are not contained in the noun lexicon of the system. These include the relationship between singular and plural noun prefixes, knowledge about noun derivation, and data about the co-occurrence of the candidate with concords, pronouns and adjectives in a local context. Our implementation is a symbolic, voting-based process : together, all tests determine whether a candidate is a noun; accuracy on unseen test data is around 92%.

Description

Keywords

Noun guesser, Speech tagging

Sustainable Development Goals

Citation

Heid, U, Prinsloo, DJ, Faaβ, G & Taljard, E 2009, 'Designing a noun guesser for part of speech tagging in Northern Sotho', South African Journal of African Languages, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 1-19. [http://www.alasa.org.za/]